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"We didn't have a telephone and our family until I was about 15, in high school."
- Ray Bradbury
 |
| Free-fall Couch | ||
| Furniture that achieves the comfort of free-fall, the weightless condition normally achieved only in space. |
There are several purposes to sleeping or lying in null-gravity, or something like it. The most important is that, since you aren't touching anything, you are unlikely to be disturbed by outside sensations.
| BB Surbringer was my AI expert. BB worked in Hegemony Flow Control Records and Statistics and spent most of his life reclining on a free-fall couch with half a dozen microleads running from his skull while he communed with other bureaucrats in datumplane. |
| Technovelgy from Hyperion,
by Dan Simmons. Published by Doubleday in 1989 Additional resources -
|
In the novel, the person who uses it has projected his awareness into cyberspace; he wants to reduce outside stimulation to a minimum.
In the 1950's, psychologists developed a very specialized device called a sensory deprivation or isolation tank to try to answer questions about what the brain did without stimulation. What Dr. John Lilly found was startling:
Is it really easier to sleep in free-fall? According to a study conducted on two flights in 1998, five astronauts stopped snoring almost completely. They also experienced fewer episodes of sleep apnea (temporarily cessation of breathing) and hypopnea (shallow breathing, both of which cause disturbance to sleep. See Sleep Better in Space.
"Somewhere, deep within the brain, was a mechanism capable of generating internal experiences completely independent of the outside world, and this settled the issue of what happens in profound physical isolation. The mind does not pass into unconsciousness, the brain does not shut down. Instead, it constructs experience out of stored impressions and memories. The isolated mind becomes highly active and creative."
I think that it is this image that the author is trying to evoke using the idea of a "free-fall" couch.
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
